Wow! Fixed my issues really quickly and also helped with other software to make the custom software work. This was a major problem for us costing us several thousand a year… Andy fixed it for under £2k by actually LISTENING to what we needed and fixing what the actual problem was easily and speedily saving us thousands!
Jo Smedley, Founder & Managing Director of Red Herring Games
Background
Based in Grimsby, Red Herring Games are a multi-award winning company that provide a huge range of games all over the world. Specialising in murder mystery, they can even develop games that are completely bespoke! Additionally, Red Herring host live murder mystery events and parties throughout the year with trained actors and these have been moved online.
Brief
For most games, Red Herring have a character booklet detailed the game play and instructions. These are customised to each client which produces lengthy documents with many pages, as each document contains all of the character booklets for one game. For example, the average character booklet is 8 pages; so if it is a 10 player game, the document would be 80 pages long.
The problem was the lack of an easy way to separate the booklets, meaning if only one page changed the entire document would need to be sent to the printer again. It also meant there was no way of sending individual booklets. You can see how, overtime, the cost of doing this soon racks up and therefore eats into profit margin. The way the documents are produced needed to stay the same, so our mission was to find a way to split the large documents into separate booklets.
How we helped
In this case the solution was simple – we created a web application that takes the documents containing every booklet and splits them based on the number of pages entered by the user, saving them as individual documents. The application can do this in bulk and because it’s in the cloud not only can it be used from any computer in the world but it also boasts impressive speeds irrespective of the user’s computer.
For us, this illustrates that bespoke solutions don’t have to be huge and complicated to have a significant impact on your business. In many ways the software we developed was the missing part of the puzzle for Red Herring Games, and has made life quicker and easier. Not to mention the saving in printing costs, which is huge.
On top of this, we were pleased to be able to advise the staff on some of the best software available to help them achieve other tasks. After all, there’s no point in re-inventing the wheel and we’d rather focus on creating solutions to supercharge your business!
We urge you to use this as inspiration to look at your business and think: what small task is having an impact on your profit margin? You may be surprised, and it’s a great starting point to explore how custom software could help you.